"Andy
Warhol began as a commercial illustrator, and a very successful
one, doing jobs like shoe ads for I. Miller in a stylish blotty
line that derived from Ben Shahn. He first exhibited in an art
gallery in 1962, when the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles showed
his 32 Campbell's Soup Cans, 1961-62. From then on, most of
Warhol's best work was done over a span of about six years,
finishing in 1968, when he was shot. And it all flowed from
one central insight: that in a culture glutted with information,
where most people experience most things at second or third
hand through TV and print, through images that become banal
and disassociated by repeated again and again and again, there
is role for affectless art. You no longer need to be hot and
full of feeling. You can be supercool, like a slightly frosted
mirror. Not that Warhol worked this out; he didn't have to.
He felt it and embodied it. He was a conduit for a sort of collective
American state of mind in which celebrity - the famous image
of a person, the famous brand name - had completely replaced
both sacredness and solidity. Earlier artists, like Monet, had
painted the same motif in series in order to display minute
discriminations of perception, the shift of light and color
form hour to hour on a haystack, and how these could be recorded
by the subtlety of eye and hand. Warhol's thirty-two soup cans
are about nothing of the kind. They are about sameness (though
with different labels): same brand, same size, same paint surface,
same fame as product. They mimic the condition of mass advertising,
out of which his sensibility had grown. They are much more deadpan
than the object which may have partly inspired them, Jasper
Johns's pair of bronze Ballantine ale cans. This affectlessness,
this fascinated and yet indifferent take on the object, became
the key to Warhol's work; it is there in the repetition of stars'
faces (Liz, Jackie, Marilyn, Marlon, and the rest), and as a
record of the condition of being an uninvolved spectator it
speaks eloquently about the condition of image overload in a
media saturated culture. Warhol extended it by using silk screen,
and not bothering to clean up the imperfections of the print:
those slips of the screen, uneven inkings of the roller, and
general graininess. What they suggested was not the humanizing
touch of the hand but the pervasiveness of routine error and
of entropy..."
- From "American Visions", by Robert Hughes
